Although JSON Web Tokens (JWT) is a younger specification than its more well-established cousin, OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token authentication, JWT has been adopted by quite a few in the Drupal community due to its relative simplicity. In this installment, we explore JSON Web Tokens and how this authentication mechanism can benefit your decoupled Drupal architecture.

No two Drupalists are exactly alike. But just how much do Drupalists differ from one another? What trends are emerging in the adoption of tools and user behaviors throughout the Drupal community? Take the Drupal user tools and trends survey to help Drupal better serve its community.

If you’ve been reading about new -- and promised -- easy-to-use page builders, you many not be aware that the Drupal community has been working on a super ambitious visual design tool, Layout Builder, that will be included in the next version of Drupal, Drupal 8.7, scheduled to be released this Spring, 2019.

Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of sharing insights and tutorials on decoupled Drupal, which was originally unknown territory with shifting sands but today is a widely adopted approach, including by some of Acquia's most influential customers. Nonetheless, the relative unavailability of developer-focused resources that are both authoritative and current has hindered architects' and developers' ability to evaluate and explore decoupled Drupal for themselves.

Though there was no DrupalCon Europe this year, the European Drupal community stepped up and organized their own conference, Drupal Europe, in Darmstadt, Germany last month. An incredibly successful gathering held in the Darmstadtium venue, a beautiful convention center in the center of this college town, Drupal Europe demonstrated the unique power that grassroots initiatives can have in our open-source community.

With a uniquely diverse community of designers, developers, and everyone in between, Frontend United is one of the conferences I find I enjoy more and more each time I attend. And this time, in Utrecht, a wide range of designer- and developer-oriented content greeted attendees both within and well outside the Drupal universe.

Acquia’s Professional Services team recently released an open-source application that demonstrates how Drupal and Node.js can easily be paired to create beautiful and functional decoupled applications. See how easy it was to create the Drupal backend using a combination of Acquia and Drupal community projects such as Lightning, BLT, and DrupalVM. This will allow you to follow the same process to rapidly create your own custom decoupled applications.